Fear of Mirrors. Tariq Ali
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assisted your father. He joined the Nazi Party. This was his reward. He moved in with his family. Took the practice, the house, the furniture. Everything. A few years ago he got scared and sold the property. It’s empty now. They’re going to knock it down and build apartments. The garden will disappear completely. He’s still in Munich. One of our distinguished citizens. He’s set up a medical publishing house.’
We had lunch with Frank in a cafe. Gertie wanted to give him some money, but realized that she had none herself.
I thought of that visit, Karl, when, about two years ago, the inquisitors arrived from Bonn. I remember the date, because it was Helge’s birthday. The sixth of April. These three men had come to investigate me and to decide whether I was a fit person to teach at the university. They were not in the least interested in the fact that I was opposed to the old regime, that I had shielded dissidents, distributed pamphlets, marched on the streets, helped bring down the Wall. They actually laughed when I showed them the manifesto I had helped to draft for the Forum for German Democracy.
‘Marxist gibberish,’ was the verdict of the man with red hair.
‘You may have brought them out on the streets, but they voted for Chancellor Kohl!’ his colleague informed me in a polite voice.
I never discussed this event with you before now Karl, because I was frightened. I thought you might agree with them. I was wrong. Forgive me. I wanted to shout at these hypocrites. Remind them of Schwaben. Ask when I could have Gertrude’s house back. Ask why the Nazi who had stolen my grandparents’ house was still thriving while they were making us all redundant. Instead I remained calm. I explained the volatility of the situation. Reminded them of how Turks and Vietnamese were being burnt alive in their homes while the citizens of the new Germany stood by and the Chancellor washed his hands.
‘Why,’ I asked them at one point, ‘do you despise us Easterners so much? For us, not even a Treaty of Passau!’
They looked at me with blank impressions, none of them wanting to admit that they had no idea when or what the Treaty of Passau was. It was my only triumph that day. I explained that through the Treaty of 1552, the Lutherans had accepted a surly and grudging co-existence with the Catholic Church.
They questioned me for three hours, but it took them fifteen minutes to reach a verdict. They called me in to the investigation room, where, in the old days, I had often faced the hostility of our own ideological commissars.
‘Professor Meyer, please sit down. After careful consideration, the Commission has decided that you are not fit to teach the course on Comparitive Literature at Humboldt University. We are aware of your gift for languages, your knowledge of English, Russian and Chinese. We are confident that you will carry on your translation work, which is of a high quality. But teaching. Now that, in our new conditions, is something different …’
I wrote you a brief letter telling you that I’d been sacked. I wanted to tell you how I was haunted by fear, tormented by insecurity, desperate for your mother to return. I walked around the city aimlessly for several hours. There was dust everywhere. Scaffolding on every main street. Hitler and Speer had wanted to rebaptize Berlin. Germania was their favoured name. Berlin will be a capital city once again.
At least it will bring you back here, Karl, away from the Ollenauerstrasse and quiet, old Bonn. That will be nice. I get the feeling that the architects are reverting to the nineteenth century, trying to forget that this century even happened. If they succeed, they will destroy Berlin.
I thought of our two cities in one. For too long, the Western half had been a forbidden zone. Did you know that sex shops have taken the place of churches and chapels? They cater for every taste. In Wedding, where Gertrude and David lived when they ran away from Munich, and which was a Communist working-class stronghold, the new entrepreneurs are trading in exotica. Rare tropical birds, powder from the horn of a rhinoceros, dried pigs’ ears and a lot else.
Berlin is a shamelessly consumerist city. Art consists of the chassis of an old Cadillac fixed to slabs of concrete and wooden benches with carved breasts and penises.
To my own amazement, Karl, I began to miss the drab, dingy, prudish Berlin where both you and I grew up.
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*The Communist (Third) International (Comintern) was launched with great fanfare in Moscow in 1919. Its aim was a World Revolution of which it was the General Staff. It laid down a set of twenty-one conditions for membership, the principal function of which was to split the existing Socialist Parties of the Second International and form new Communist parties. For the first four years, the heroic period of the Comintern, this aim was pursued vigorously. Later, the Comintern became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy. It was dissolved unilaterally by Stalin in 1943 to convince Churchill and Roosevelt that he was a reliable ally.
KARL MEYER stood at the window of his second-floor apartment on the Fritz-Tillman-Strasse in Bonn. He sometimes regretted his escape to this strange city. At first he had wanted to forget everything about Berlin. The Wall. The Fall. His parents. Gerhard. A beautiful teacher named Marianne. Grandma Gertrude. Everything. He loved them all, but when he looked back and remembered his father’s petulance and blindness to reality or his mother’s insistence on a monotone reading of the rich complexities of European politics, his anger returned. His parents were always delirious in their irrationality. The protective wall they had built around themselves and their friends had fallen at the same time as that other Wall. Now they complained bitterly of the miseries and lunacies of the new order. Karl held them responsible for their own failure.
Now, close to the centres of power in this dying capital, he was afraid of being forgotten by them. His mother was happy in New York, but Karl was often anxious about the state of his father’s mind and health. He put on his dark-blue suit, found a matching bow-tie, and inspected himself in the mirror. He saw a very self-contained, slender, square-jawed young man. He nodded in approval, locked his flat and descended via the lift to street level. The cafe where he breakfasted was in the same block. As he sipped his espresso, Karl quickly flicked through that morning’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Much speculation as to whether Kohl would last the course as Chancellor this time; reports of a dissident Muslim-Serb alliance in Bosnia; another crisis for the British Conservatives.
Karl was indifferent to the Balkans. Britain, in his eyes, was a laboratory experiment that had gone badly wrong, and the guinea pigs were on the verge of an electoral revolt. Perhaps, under a new government, it might be of some interest to Germany. Perhaps.
The fact was that Karl was interested only in the minutae of German politics. He knew, of course, that the United States, Japan and China were the major planetary players, but even this knowledge did not excite any real interest in the last two countries. Karl was a new German. He wanted Germany to play its part in the world. He did not believe that the crimes of the Third Reich annulled Germany’s traditional position in the centre of Europe.
A few weeks ago, Karl, on the instructions of his leader, had spent a whole afternoon in concentrated talks with two pivotal Free Democrat members of parliament, one of whom had defied his party’s instructions and failed to vote for the Christian Democrats’ choice of Chancellor.
Karl’s mission was as straightforward as his demeanour. He wanted Kohl dethroned, and the SPD leader crowned Chancellor in his place. His hosts plied him with questions about the future. How many posts in the Cabinet? What were SPD intentions on Europe? Could the young man assure them that Scharping was more than a creature of the apparatus?
Karl hid nothing. He told his astonished interlocutors that German stability required a Chancellor controlled by the apparatus. Better a weak-kneed provincial than a loud-mouthed populist who excited hopes that could never be fulfilled. Only under the SPD could Germany use its economic muscle and exert a political pressure commensurate with its new-found status in the post-Communist world. He added, for good measure, that only a politically assertive Germany